Harry

“Are you sure you don’t want breakfast, sweetheart?” Sal waved her frying pan at me. “It’s no trouble, honestly.”

I backed away, clutching the green smoothie I’d managed to whizz up before she’d caught me and threatened me with a bacon sandwich. “Thank you, but I’m good. Got lots to do today.”

“You say that every day,” Sal retorted.

And she wasn’t wrong. Despite being an early riser in the city, in the week and a half I’d been at the Farm, I’d been the last one up every single day—meaning it was a rare morning that I cobbled my breakfast together without having to dodge Sal’s cholesterol train.

“It’s true.” I spread the hand that wasn’t clutching the smoothie and took another step back. “I didn’t come here for a holiday.”

“Holiday? What’s that? It’s only the young ones around here have time for that nonsense.” Sal finally disarmed, dropping her pan on the stove. “All right, luv. I’ve got the donkeys to do, but I’ll bring you some tea in a little while.”

It was a fair compromise now I’d convinced her that I didn’t need three sugars dumped in the builder’s brew she doled out every couple of hours, and I retreated upstairs, leaving my bedroom door ajar to save her the trouble of knocking. I went to the desk and opened my laptop. The planning software I’d been fudging the night before was there to greet me, and I nearly slammed the laptop shut again. The software was supposed to remind me of all the wonderful notes I’d left at home, but it had, so far, failed. Chapter Two—Your Mind is a Machine. What did that even mean?

I sat down and spent an hour or so trying to find out, but it was hard to concentrate at this time of day. Early morning meant mucking out, and the yard below was a hive of activity. Joe, George, Toby, and the girls—they were all there, except Emma. She didn’t come to the yard every day.

Around ten, I needed a break. I shut the laptop, swapped my T-shirt for a compression vest, and laced up my running shoes. A protein bar topped up my liquid breakfast, and then I headed downstairs. Outside, I took a route that kept me away from the fields and took me into town. Road running was hard on my knees, but the scenery around the farm was gorgeous, and I’d made it all the way to Holywell by the time I stopped for a rest.

I stretched my legs out on a bench outside the little shop where the farm seemed to get most of its basic groceries—bread, milk, eggs. As luck would have it, Joe emerged a few minutes into my stop, a jumbo packet of sausages tucked under his arm.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

I’d grown used to his bluntness by now. The way he barked out questions like you’d been put on this earth to irritate him. I didn’t take it personally—anymore. I couldn’t deny that I’d spent my first few days on the farm believing that he hated me. It had taken me a few days to see that he was rude to just about everyone. “Running. It’s a beautiful day.”

Joe squinted through the bright sunshine, narrowing his ever-suspicious eyes. “I swear I saw you at the gate half an hour ago.”

I checked my watch. “You probably did.”

“You ran all the way here in half an hour?”

“Looks that way.”

Joe stared me down—or, at least, tried to. I’d grown used to that too, and he reminded me of the semi-feral cats who lived around the house at the farm. The females were generally friendly if I tossed them a bit of chicken, but the tomcats remained aloof, glaring at me from a distance until I glared back hard enough for them to lose interest and wander off.

True to form, Joe grunted and walked away. He was at his van I hadn’t noticed parked a few feet from the bench when he turned back. “It’s my turn to make lunch. Are you about?”

Damn it. What was it about this family and feeding me? “Don’t worry about me. I’ll sort myself out later.”

“With what? The three-hundred chicken breasts you’ve stashed in the fridge.”

“Probably.”

Joe opened his van and tossed the sausages inside. Again, I expected him to follow the bangers and drive off, but something drew me closer to him. I was a foot or so away when he turned, leaning back on the van, the sun that had been in his eyes before now casting a sinful shadow across his face. “How do you stay so big when you don’t eat fuck all?”

I suppressed an age-old urge to fold my arms across my chest and hunch my shoulders. “I eat.”

“I’ve never seen you.”

“Liar. I had dinner with you last night.”

“That boiled chicken breast shite you were eating? Fuck that.”

I forced a grin. “It’s good for fitness—high protein, low fat. I don’t know how you eat all those carbs and stay so lean.”

“Calling me skinny?”

There was humour in Joe’s stormy eyes, but I denied it anyway. “No, I’m saying that if I ate like you, I’d be the size of a house.”

“You are the size of a house.”

“A softer house, then.”

Joe laughed—really laughed, from deep in his belly instead of his usual gruff and reluctant chuckle. “You’re a strange man.”

He was one to talk, but I let it go with a shrug. “If you say so. I’m probably just jealous. I haven’t had a sausage in years.”

Joe stopped laughing. His eyebrows disappeared into his inky hairline, and his gaze flashed with something I couldn’t quite decipher but yet seemed oddly familiar at the same time. A silence stretched between us—neither loaded or light. And then, finally, the innuendo of what I’d said hit home.

Shit. Was I about to get bitch-slapped with some homophobic bullshit? No one at Whisper Farm seemed interested enough to give a fuck about my queerness, and I’d assumed—given that most of them had referenced my blog—that it wasn’t a secret. That it didn’t need to be.

My heart skipped a beat. That wasn’t unheard of in Joe’s company, but it felt different now, and I took an unconscious step back before I caught myself. Fuck that. I was out and proud and pushing thirty. Was I really going to back down from this when I’d faced down—

Joe’s long fingers closed around my wrist. “What’s up with you?”

“What?”

Joe studied me, his eyebrows back in their rightful place. “You look hungry.”

Even though we’d spent the majority of the last five minutes bickering about food, it was the last thing I expected him to say. “What?”

“Stop saying what. You’re making me feel like I’m jabbering nonsense like my grandparents did.” Joe released my wrist. “Just come home and have your lunch, will you? Ma’s starting to think she can’t cook, and that shit ain’t right.”

He got in the van and drove away. It seemed like he’d left in slow motion, but when I looked up from checking my arm for finger-shaped sear marks, it felt like I’d blinked and come awake to find myself in the strangest of places.

I started running again, instinct drawing me in the general direction of the farm. I’d intended to find a robust tree to use as a chin-up bar on my way back, but I got sucked into the hypnotic rhythm of my feet slapping the ground and was at the farm gate before I knew it.

It was too early for whatever Joe had planned for lunch, so I dodged the kitchen and found some trees by the donkey paddock. One of the donkeys—Reggie, I think—wandered over to stare at me while I completed six-dozen reps of chin-ups. My biceps were burning by the time I’d finished, and hunger rumbled in my gut. I’d learned not to ignore it in recent years, but I didn’t fancy facing Joe again just yet. His moods—and mine—were giving me whiplash.

Lacking any brighter ideas, I shinned up the tree and picked an apple. I dropped out of the branches to find Toby waiting for me, apparently unconcerned with the houseguest climbing the trees. “Joe wants you.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Just said to fetch you in.”

Brilliant. I trailed Toby to the house, cringing when he veered off in the yard and ducked into the feed store, leaving me to face Joe alone.

With a sigh, I went inside. Joe was in the kitchen, hacking up sausages at the table, an unlit cigarette dangling between his pillowy lips. “You rang?” I said.

“Your mum did, actually. She stayed on the line for a bit, but you took the scenic route to get here from monkeying around in the trees.”

The fact that he’d been watching made me warm all over, almost eclipsing the guilt at pushing my mum’s weekly email to the bottom of my to-do list. “Was she okay?”

“Aye. Seemed to be. I did check that it wasn’t urgent, and I told her that your phone was probably dipping in and out of service. She said to check your email, eat your greens, and call her back when you can.”

Joe kept his eyes on his sausages. Anyone else, I’d have pondered if they were taking the piss, but if there was one thing I knew about Joe, it was that he was an even bigger mummy’s boy than I had once been.

“Thanks,” I said. “My phone is playing up, and I keep forgetting to email her. I gave her the farm number for emergencies. Hope that’s okay.”

“’Course it is. Living here, aren’t you?”

“I s’pose.”

Joe leaned back in his chair and retrieved a net of onions from the vegetable rack behind him. “You’re lucky my ma didn’t take that call. If she found out you’d been blanking your old dear, she’d have your guts for garters.”

“I haven’t heard that saying in years.”

“What saying?”

“Guts for garters. My nan used to say it.”

“Yeah, well. We all talk like old women down here. Ain’t got no slick city speak going on.” Joe started chopping his mountain of onions and chucking them in a huge pan. “But feel free to use the farm phone to call your mum anytime. I can’t promise it won’t get cut off, but feel free all the same.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. I went with not, as every dinnertime seemed to be taken up by him and Emma squabbling about money. “Thanks. What are you making? Do you need a hand?”

“You want to help cook something you have no intention of eating?”

“I never said I wouldn’t eat it.”

Joe threw more onions in the pan. “Fair enough. Stick them bangers on the stove then.”

I swallowed a poor attempt at humour and took the plate of hacked up sausages to the stove. A frying pan was waiting on the burner. “Is this for the sausages?”

“Yup. Fry them off, then I’ll stick them in here.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fried anything, and Sal’s bemusement on the morning she’d caught me poaching my eggs flashed into my mind. “What are you drowning them poor eggs for?”

Joe appeared at my shoulder. “What are you grinning about?”

I didn’t fancy admitting that I’d been daydreaming about his mum, so I shrugged and turned the gas on under the pan. “Just happy to be alive, man.”

Joe’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I reckon that kale sludge sends you bananas.”

“What’s wrong with being happy?”

“Nothing, it just probably means you haven’t lived.”

I wasn’t in the mood to challenge that bullshit, and I knew Joe enough by now to know there was little point. He wore his cynicism like a second skin—spiky and tough—and didn’t respond well to attempts to break through his walls. “If you say so.”

The sausages hit the pan, sizzling and popping, fat leaching out of them. My stomach turned, but I tried to ignore it and then forced myself to when reasoning with my skewed logic didn’t work. I will not be hard on myself today. The affirmation was an old friend, and one I used with my patients too, but today, Joe’s close proximity turned out to be the push I needed to step away from the past.

He chucked his own huge pan on the stove and lit another burner. His shoulder bumped me, and I shivered. His dark eyes found mine. I lost myself briefly in the liquid depths, but I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed my reaction to him. Joe was a perfect contradiction—thoroughly predictable and yet impossible to read.

Fat spat out of the sausage pan and splattered my arm. The sting broke the spell. I tore my gaze from Joe’s and peered at the sausages, bracing myself for another ripple of disgust, but my stomach rebelled and growled, and for the first time in years, I stared at a puddle of saturated fat and wanted to eat it.

The sensation surprised me, but Joe didn’t give me the chance to process it. He reached across me for the salt and his hair brushed my cheek, the nape of his neck inches from my face.

Not for the first time, I wanted to put my lips on him. Most days he was a complete twat, but in moments like these, when he wasn’t glaring or snapping, he was so wonderfully human that I forgot myself.

“Sling them bangers in here.”

“What?”

Joe nudged me, sending another jolt of electricity surging through my veins. “Give me the sausages.”

I tipped the contents of my pan into Joe’s, noting the healthy selection of vegetables he’d added to his onions while I’d been under his thrall—carrots, peppers, tomatoes—and trying not to recoil in horror as he lobbed in two cans of Heinz baked beans.

And failed, apparently. “What’s the face for now?”

I schooled my features. “What face?”

“The one Ma gets when I flick broccoli at the cats.”

“You don’t like broccoli?”

Joe shuddered, and I swear I felt the vibration in my toes. “Fuck no. It looks like liquidised boy scouts when she cooks it.”

I had noticed Sal’s habit of boiling her veg like they’d been to Chernobyl and back. “It’s nice when you treat it right.”

“So are horses, but you still seem shit-scared of them.”

He had me there. I’d only managed to befriend the donkeys so far, and that was mainly because they were so noisy and cartoon-cute that I couldn’t bring myself to be afraid of them. “Which horse do you think is the friendliest? I’ve got a different answer from everyone so far.”

At that, Joe smiled, revealing a set of teeth that were unfairly white, given the amount he seemed to smoke. “Let me guess . . . Emma said Tauna, George plumped for Noel, and the young ’uns said Flea?”

I laughed. “How did you know?”

“Because everyone has their favourites and their reasons for loving them. Tauna brings Emma out of her shell. Shame she’s too knackered to ride, really, ’cause I reckon Emma would go anywhere with her. And George and Noel have been pals for life. George delivered that foal before I was born . . . oldest idiots here, them two.”

“What about Flea?”

“He’s a Shetland,” Joe said. “And he eats Hula Hoops off your fingers. Of course the kids are going to go for him.”

“So . . .” I watched Joe stir up what appeared to be an enormous pot of stew. “What’s the real answer?”

“Mani,” Joe replied like it was obvious. “He’s a true elder. You ever feel like giving up on this shit, go see him and tell him I sent you.”

It was a sweet offer, but as Joe threw a lid on his pan of mystery and left the kitchen, I knew it was one I’d never take up. Mani was huge, and more than that, I’d seen Joe in his stable late at night, his head resting on the horse’s neck, his face buried in his mane. I knew jack about horses, but I knew a sacred bond when I saw one.

Mani was Joe’s soul horse. Perhaps one day I’d find my own.